The Gaming Den

Does anyone still need the super-long turn timer? I tend to find with timers over 3 days it just encourages me to procrastinate and I forget when the turn is due.

I'm pretty solid for 1-2 days right now.

Sorry, thought my turn was in already, sending it now.

Ikeren wrote:Sorry, thought my turn was in already, sending it now.

Red_Rob wrote:Does anyone still need the super-long turn timer? I tend to find with timers over 3 days it just encourages me to procrastinate and I forget when the turn is due.

Not just me then...

So how are things? Any updates for the folks at home?

I staled a bunch of turns, but Miasma and earlier entrenching has kept me from losing too much territory. Put up a global that's supposed to give me free manikins, and currently focusing on wiping out Abysia. I'm letting my south and west get picked away, but trying to make it an unpleasant and expensive prospect.

Well, my turn in Ermor's driver seat was kicked off with fighting K's army, which did the most hilariously stupid thing I've seen anyone do in Dominions. See, he had a bunch of Horror-marked mages, and he had some of them cast Hell Power, which as you may recall summons Horrors onto the battlefield. Since his own mages were the only people on the battlefield with horror marks, the Horrors attacked them. He lost basically the entire army and half of his mages, including a valuable national hero with Holy 3. I lost a bunch of scrub undead and zero commanders of any form. He went AI the next turn for some reason.

I've been having a war of undead and death magic against Scleria, which so far has been going pretty well. In many ways he's more set for assets than I am because he's got Shadow Vestals and also can employ banishment spam, but between crash-researching Dust To Dust and being Ermor, I've been managing. The last fight had him use Wither Bones, though, which has me jumpy.

Burden Of Time is still up.

Ashdod is attacking C`tis, though we offered you a NAP-3 in exchange for provinces to get at Ermor

Also, looking for water-nature gems, have others. Mostly Astral.

Ikeren wrote:Ashdod is attacking C`tis, though we offered you a NAP-3 in exchange for provinces to get at Ermor

Sorry, but I'm really curious to see how Burden of Time and Haunted Forest Interact. If you could attack some of my forest provinces, I'd appreciate it, I think I might have discovered a bug.

I'll get there eventually. But I'd like that Burden of Time turned off hopefully

Operation Cremation could have gone better, but it accomplished its primary goal of *don't lose the fort.*

Operation Clockstopper lamentably failed. Trying again with more oomph.

Interesting Globals this game. Don't think I've seen Haunted Forest in an actual game yet.

name_here wrote:Well, my turn in Ermor's driver seat was kicked off with fighting K's army, which did the most hilariously stupid thing I've seen anyone do in Dominions. See, he had a bunch of Horror-marked mages, and he had some of them cast Hell Power, which as you may recall summons Horrors onto the battlefield. Since his own mages were the only people on the battlefield with horror marks, the Horrors attacked them. He lost basically the entire army and half of his mages, including a valuable national hero with Holy 3. I lost a bunch of scrub undead and zero commanders of any form. He went AI the next turn for some reason.

I went AI because I was making ten Abysian troops a turn and Ermor was making hundreds of high-quality undead a turn and had unlocked Solar Eclipse. Non-Abysian troops were not going to be an effective crutch for my empire any more.

As for that battle, you really should re-watch it. The Horrors only got like two mages before my whole army broke because you'd killed over half my army with overwhelming military might and the whole army routed. If your take-way was "hurr hurr, that dummy cast Hell Power," then you obviously weren't paying attention.

Still, I killed 312 Ermorian troops for 84 of my own when Ermor brought 676 troops and I brought 109. I was pretty happy with the results of that fight and the benefits of Hell Power in boosting Warlocks who would otherwise not have been able to contribute meaningfully in a battle against Ermor because they only have Astral and Blood. Honestly, only the H3 hero dying was annoying since he's basically a replacement for a single STR mage that Abysia can get out of any castle.

I will admit that I didn't check to see if the army broke from losses or from the Horrors and their fear effect. I did, however, confirm that I didn't kill a single one of your mages myself. Half of them died, including a lot of banishment spammers, and it was all up to the Horrors. Perhaps if you had used your supply of S2 mages to cast Horror Mark, things would have gone better for you.

name_here wrote:I will admit that I didn't check to see if the army broke from losses or from the Horrors and their fear effect. I did, however, confirm that I didn't kill a single one of your mages myself. Half of them died, including a lot of banishment spammers, and it was all up to the Horrors. Perhaps if you had used your supply of S2 mages to cast Horror Mark, things would have gone better for you.

I lost three H2 Banishment spammers to Horrors after my army broke and one H3 a few turns before I broke. At best, I might have killed another 20-30 undead before the rout. Losing those mages was actually a pretty unlikely result since none of the H2 or H3's were Horror Marked and there was no reason for the Horrors to target them preferentially.

That being said, there was no set of circumstances where casting Hell Power or not was going to meaningfully affect the outcome of the battle or the war. I was losing both pretty handily and made a choice to experiment with trying to make my Warlocks useful because it was far more valuable to me to get data for future games than it was to keep them in reserve for when I went AI in this game.

For your own future knowledge, you should know that having the S2s cast Horror Mark would have left me without the Communion to cast Hell Power, so your suggestion would not have worked. The other useful data I can pass along is that Dom4 mages will not target nearby Horrors like they would in Dom3, making Hell Power a lot more dangerous than in Dom3.

I'm trying to start up another game. It'll be called BadNationsForBadPeople.

God damnit Ermor.

*manical cackling*

For those at home: last turn someone dispelled Burden of Time. This turn it went back up.

And this turn it's going back down.

edit: Boast validated.

Nice.

... and now it's back up. I can't smush it a third time on my own.

I don't think Burden of Time is synergizing with Haunted Forest at all. I guess only dead soldiers in forest provinces turn into manikins? Or maybe the spell's just bugged. Still, this is a very educational game. I'm definitely looking forward to my next C'tis build.

I think it's only supposed to be good for battle reanimation, and I have no idea if that would normally let you get corpses in the province not from the battle. Still good for raising in other ways, though.

Incidentally, what is the kill rate on BoT like for population? My lands are already depopulated hellscapes, so I can't really judge.